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Georges Raepsaet (born 3 August 1947) is a Belgians classical archaeologist and historian of antiquity. His main research interests are the archaeology of ancient technologies, especially traction systems in Greco-Roman land transport and farming, the production and trade of ancient and the wider socioeconomic implications of these technologies, as well as Roman Gaul. His methods include the use of experimentation.
From 1997 to 1999 Raepsaet co-directed a research programme on the process of technological innovation in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Currently, he works as an expert for the European Science Foundation and chairs the scientific committee of the Royal Museum of Mariemont. Since 1970 Raepsaet has been on the editorial board of the Belgian journal L’Antiquité Classique for which he has been reviewing each year about thirty books on classic archaeology, economic history and ancient technology.
Since 1970 Raepsaet has participated in and directed several archaeological excavations and fieldworks in Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean basin. These include underwater excavations at Martigues, France, and Amathus on Cyprus, as well as fieldwork at the site of the Diolkos on the Isthmus and Styra on Euboea (1984–88). He also took part in excavations in Apamea, Syria (1978–79) and in numerous archaeological projects on the Roman period in his native Belgium (since 1968). At Brussels he was in charge of temporary exhibitions of Ancient Greek marbles ( Marbres helléniques, 1987–88) and of Thracian gold ( Europalia Bulgarie, 2002).
From 1997 to 2007 Raepsaet conducted a number of tests in experimental archaeology on ancient agricultural techniques, in particular on the efficiency of Gallo-Roman Horse harness, drawbars and the reaper ( vallus). Over the years Raepsaet has also been active in the study of the technology and trade of Roman ceramics, its distribution and transport network in the and commercial and legal aspects related to it.
Raepsaet focused on the key role of traction systems in land transport and , a field then dominated by strong primitivist views. He demonstrated that ancient transport capacities were in fact largely identical to and as developed and efficient as those of later periods up until the 19th century, but with the Romans enjoying the additional advantage of having a superior Roman roads at their disposal. Through his study of Gallo-Roman harnesses, Raepsaet came to reject the early, but influential theory of Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes about the inefficiency of the Roman horse collar. In reality, draught animals in antiquity were able to move heavy loads of several dozens tons overland evident, for example, in the frequent transport of or the regular use of the Diolkos ship trackway.
Raepsaet′s reappraisal of the technological level of ancient traction systems has been echoed and parallelled by a generation of classical scholars and historians of technology pursuing studies in diverse fields of ancient technology. From their collaborative effort to move beyond a sterile dichotomy of primitivism and modernism sprang, for example, Brill Publishers′s series on Technology and Change in History and the Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World which received the 2009 book award of the Society for the History of Technology.Brill: Technology and Change in HistoryThe Society for the History of Technology: The Ferguson Prize The increasingly positive perception of ancient technological developments and their economic impact has also contributed to a reevaluation of the performance of the ancient economy as a whole.Walter Scheidel; Morris, Ian ; Saller, Richard (eds.): The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2007,
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